This project examines how the rise of women’s employment and earnings affected trends in economic inequality among all households, across OECD and European countries since the 1980s. So far, prominent explanations of economic inequality have neglected the potential impact of women’s rising earnings on inequality among households, even though it is one of the most profound developments in economic activity in recent decades.

This project theorizes and analyzes how trends in women’s employment and earnings affected vertical inequality: the extent to which household incomes differ. For economic inequality it matters a great deal whether the rise of women’s employment and earnings was predominantly among singles and single mothers, among women living in couples, or among households with additional earners that already were close to the top (or bottom) of the earnings distribution. In this project, I also study how institutional contexts shape employment and earnings of women across diverse households.

This proposed theory will be rigorously tested using state-of-the-art quantile regression techniques and longitudinal data from EU-SILC and LIS, combined with high quality indicators of institutional context. Empirical studies address four areas of particular interest: (A1.) family diversity including single parents, (A2.) causal inferences, and the impact of the institutional context that is characterized both by (B1.) family policy and (B2.) social security.

The triple bind of single-parent families is available for free/open access download.

What kind of barriers and risks do single parents face? In their new book, The Triple Bind of Single-Parent Families: Resources, Employment and Policies to Improve Well-Being (Policy Press, 2018), editors Rense Nieuwenhuis and Laurie C. Maldonado argue that understanding inadequate resources, employment, and policies matter for understanding single-parent families. They refer to these as the “Triple Bind.” Part One explores resources, including exploring education, wealth gaps, and school settings. Other chapters in this section also explore how single-parenthood is often a transitory phase and the importance of co-parenting. Part Two explored inadequate employment and starts with an important chapter about taking a life course perspective when researching single-parents. The chapters in this section also tackle income transfers, paid parental leave, and other workplace characteristics. Part Three focuses on redistributive policies, including cash benefits, universal vs. targeted polices, daycare, and minimum income. Part Four concludes the book with important discussions around framing single-parents in a “deficit model” way, the importance of gender in the discussion of single-parents, and ideas for future research.

This book is free to download in its entirety online and therefore is made accessible to anyone who may be interested in one or all of the topics contained within! Overall, this book tackles important topics around single-parents around the world and would be useful for an upper level undergraduate course in the Sociology of Family or Family Studies. It would also be the perfect addition to a graduate level course that focus on families.

Researchblogging.org is a non-profit initiative, and provides in a web-based gathering of posts from weblogs on science. Not all posts are gathered (‘aggregated’) though, only the ones that explicitly address research that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In that, it distinguishes itself clearly from similar (collections of) scientists’ blogs, for everything else but the research itself is left out. This is achieved by having bloggers to administer their posts on the researchblogging.org website manually, after which some PHP-code is provided. This code is added to the blog-post, resulting in a bibliographic reference to the article that is discussed, as well as the aggregation of the article to the researchblogging database.

For me, this results in a very interesting collection of blog-posts, that are nicely categorised and stored in a searchable database accessible though the web. And this is where the new version of researchblogging.org becomes really interesting, because next to a visual update, new features have been added. Bloggers now can categorise their posts manually, making them easier to find by prospective readers.

More importantly, though, is the ability to ‘flag’ posts by readers. I find this very important, for not all posts are that great, to my opinion. That is, they are very nice to read at times, but without a strong focus on peer-reviewed research. An often encountered format is someone writing about a topic, and then adding a reference to an article loosely related to that topic to get it aggregated. In my opinion, posts on peer-reviewed research should explicitly discuss the findings and the quality of the research design. Sure, good journalism requires the author to add some context to the article, or even a little pun, but the thoroughness of the critical review should not be lost. So, I think it is a good development that readers can now more easily whether posts on researchblogging.org truly address peer-reviewed publications in a critical manner.

Personally, I have been writing for researchblogging.org for a few months now, which has resulted in a modest number of articles (find a selection here). Every time, I have found it a challenge to critically think about the research I like and to detail that on my blog. This way, I have found a new way to discuss the quality of work, and to bring to attention work that I appreciate to be especially valuable. Incidentally, these posts are among the best read on my blog, so apparently the effort pays of. I cannot remember writing about research I completely disliked, although once I wrote about a completely horrendous research design, and contrasted it with one I did like. It is more difficult to do justice to articles that have been written and researched very well, than to break down the ones that did a very bad job, so evidently I’m taking the more difficult approach.

Blogging on blogging on peer reviewed research

So, all in all, how serious should we all be about blogging on peer-reviewed research? No new findings will be found on blogs, or it should be on the web-sites of journals who pre-publish a high profile publication. New insight on existing articles may be found though, and I did so myself a couple of times. Academic mores being what they are, the really important new findings, insights, and perhaps criticism will not be written down on a blog, but send to a peer reviewed journal.

But then again, there will always be a minor, but inherently social aspect to science. From that perspective, reading blogs about science is an easy way to read about what is going on in the journals you don’t normally read, or even in disciplines other than your own. Personally, as a sociologist-to-be I very much love to read about evolutionary biology, the developments regarding CERN and the search for the Higgs-particle; all things I don’t read about in the ‘real’ journals. You’ll never know in what way some insight may come in handy in one of your own future projects.

I don’t think that science ‘needs’ a site like researchblogging.org, but I do feel that it is just another way for science to open up, both to other scientists, but also to non-scientists who are interested in cutting-edge knowledge. The registered blogs are (generally) open to all readers, unlike the actual journal articles that are reviewed. In that sense, it is a form of bringing science to the masses.

Accompanied by interpretation, that is, which might seem to be a problem for some. Researchblogging.org is not only open for readers, but also relatively open to those who want to participate. Are all blogs true representations of the body of knowledge accumulated in the annals of science journals? Of course not, but how far do we want to go in restricting bloggers’ access to Researchblogging.org? Or, in other words, how open should the system be?

On researchblogging.org there is quality control when you apply to join the initiative. Your blogs needs to be in existence for a while, and some posts should already be present. Also, there have been some discussions on the forum about the appropriateness of some posts. I already discussed my disliking a specific type of posts, but some sort of solution has already been implemented in the new version. Also, one of the conditions to participate on researchblogging.org is that your blog should accept comments from readers. In this way, readers can share opinions, and discuss interpretations and conclusions. So, this system is not as closed as peer-reviewed journals are, nor is the quality control as strict, but I think this is rather good: in this way we have an semi-organized way of discussion the quality, interpretations, and merits of articles published elsewhere.

Conclusion

I think that Researchblogging.org provides many with excellent means of sharing ones’ thoughts on scientifically published journal articles. The quality of the contributions is generally high, as is the degree of representation of various disciplines. For me, this helps me in finding out about interesting articles or even interesting (sub)disciplines I wouldn’t be aware of otherwise. I hope its’ popularity will only increase with the new version, as to be able to find even more interesting posts on interesting articles.

Do you blog about peer-reviewed research? Sign up, start writing, and I’ll read you there!

Even though it is rather widely known in sociology that individual actions can have unexpected or seemingly contradictory outcomes on the societal level, I always find it highly fascinating to read about such a seemingly paradoxical mechanism. Interestingly, Jelen et al. have found one regarding the attitudes of Catholics on induced abortion.

The Catholic church categorically rejects any practice of induced abortion, and, notwithstanding any issues regarding causality, so do its members. Catholic individuals generally have a negative attitude towards induced abortion, indeed. Jelen et al. were able to replicate this in their study on `abortion attitudes in western Europe’. However, they did not find that the average level of objection against induced abortion in a country correlates with the proportion of catholics in those countries. Furthermore, they even found that when individual level catholicism is taken into account, the higher the number of catholics in the country one lives in, the more positive one is regarding induced abortion.

How is this possible? Can individual and contextual effects of Catholicism on abortion attitudes run in opposite directions? Jelen et al. hypothesize at the start of the article on three possible ways that Catholicism may influence attitudes. The first is that the Catholic church is able to impose pro-life attitudes on its own members. Secondly, it is hypothesized that the presence of Catholics in a country, along with their inculcated pro-life attitudes, influences non-Catholics in such a way, that their opinion also changes towards the pro-life stance. Finally, it is argued that the opposite might also happen: non-Catholics could take the opposite stance to the Catholics in the presence of many Catholics. A counter-mobilization, so to say.

As it was shown by the authors, the first and third hypotheses go: Catholics object against abortion, but when many Catholics are present in a country, it is shown that individuals, net from the effect of Catholicism, generally have a more positive attitude towards induced abortion. Although the authors do not use these words, I think that what they have found can be referred to as a ‘negative spill-over effect’ (spill under?), in contrast with the second hypothesis that is referred to as a ‘spill-over effect’.

On Method

Although I think that the authors elegantly present some interesting findings, and did their analyses on the data from the World Value Surveys in a meticulous fashion on the whole, some aspects of their methodology deserve some closer attention. Sure, nowadays we would use a mixed-effects model instead of the ‘flat’ regression the authors used, but remember that this is a 1993 article.

In general, one might ask why the authors only focused on Catholicism. Clearly, this is perhaps the church that must influentially instills its many members with pro-life attitudes, but nevertheless other denominations do so as well. They do however find that Catholics in a predominant Protestant country object against induced abortion the strongest, so on a contextual level attention is paid to other denominations.

What I missed in this analysis, is an estimation of the impact that legislation has on the attitudes people have. Reason for this is the detailed description of the differences between countries on account of whether or not induced abortion is legalized, and under which conditions women can choose to have an abortion. It would be interesting to see whether this has any effect, and whether it interacts with religious conviction.

To Conclude

The seemingly paradoxical finding has been solved: individual and contextual effects of Catholicism on attitudes toward induced abortion run in the opposite direction, caused by a counter-mobilization amongst non-Catholics. Interestingly, the authors discuss this by arguing that the net effect of Catholicism is difficult to assess. I wonder if the individual Catholic, expressing the pro-life stance he or she wholeheartedly beliefs in, realizes that these efforts may indeed unexpected, and unintended, consequences by instilling pro-choice attitudes amongst non-Catholics.

Reference

Jelen, T.G., O’Donnell, J., Wilcox, C. (1993). A Contextual Analysis of Catholicism and Abortion Attitudes in Western Europe . Sociology of Religion, 54(4), 375-383.